CENTER FOR LEGAL STUDIES

This First-Year seminar examines the American legal profession from its small and provincial origins in the eighteenth century to its enormous and influential presence today. It will explore topics including legal education, practice, ethics, and professional organization, and it will survey the influence of the profession in fields from politics and business to the civil rights movement. Students will gain an appreciation for the many roles that lawyers play outside of the courtroom and the way that the profession has shaped the development and application of American law.

Law is everywhere. Law permits, prohibits, enables, legitimates, protects, and prosecutes citizens. Law shapes our daily lives in countless ways. This course examines the connections and relationships of law and society using an interdisciplinary social science approach. As one of the founders of the Law and Society movement observed, "Law is too important to leave to lawyers." Accordingly, this course will borrow from several theoretical, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives (including sociology, history, anthropology, political science, and psychology) in order to explore the sociology of law and law's role. This course introduces the relationship between social, cultural, political, and economic forces on the one hand, and legal rules, practices, and outcomes, on the other. We focus on several important questions about law including: How do culture, structure, and conflict explain the relationship between law and society? Why do people obey the law? Why do people go to court? How does the legal system work? What is the role of lawyers, judges, and juries? How does law on the books differ from law in action? How do social problems become legal ones? How can law create or constrain social change?

Legal Studies Research Methods introduces students to research methods used in interdisciplinary legal studies, including jurisprudence and legal reasoning, qualitative and quantitative social science methods, and historical and textual analysis. The course is a prerequisite for the Advanced Research Seminar in Legal Studies, 398-1, - 2, and is intended to prepare students for the design of their own research project to be conducted in 398-1, -2. Through exposure to and engagement with interdisciplinary research methods on law and legal processes, the course will provide students with a deeper understanding of law in its historical and social context. The course will provide students with a set of research tools with which to conduct research on legal institutions. The course builds on content from Legal Studies 206, a prerequisite for 207. While part of the Legal Studies major sequence, the course will enrich the analytic skills of students from many fields who are interested in law or in interdisciplinary research methods. (Pre-Req: Legal_St 206 "Law & Society")

This course introduces students to the social, political, legal, and cultural history of immigration in the United States. In addition to exploring the history of southern and eastern European immigrants, it uses a comparative framework to integrate Latin American and Asian migrants into our understanding of immigration since the late nineteenth century. The course is an exploration of major themes in immigration history rather than a comprehensive examination. Issues students will consider include immigration law, acculturation, community, racial formation, victimization vs. agency, the transnational and international context of immigration, and competing notions of citizenship, among others.

This course examines the relationship between law and the distribution of power in society, with a particular emphasis on law and social change in the United States. Readings will be drawn from the social sciences and history, as well as selected court cases that raise critical questions about the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in American society. Among the material we will examine are the documents made public in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Students should be aware that some of this material is graphic and disturbing.

Key documents and debates in the development of theories of law and jurisprudence. From Aeschylus to contemporary democratic and legal theories and major court cases on topics ranging from torture to Title IX.

This course investigates the structure of American government as laid out by the Constitution. It will also examine the many controversies over what, exactly, the Constitution means, who gets to decide, and how. We will discuss judicial review, the powers of Congress and the executive branch, and the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Constitutional Law II: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

This course examines how the United States government has defined, expanded, and constricted the rights and liberties of U.S. citizens (and non-citizens) dating from the Founding era with a heavy emphasis on the Progressive Era to today. While we will examine how the U.S. Supreme Court has defined these rights and liberties, we will not confine ourselves to reading only Supreme Court opinions. We will also be interested in how other political actors (e.g., Congress, the executive branch, the states, and the mass public) have argued about, imagined, and effectuated limits on government power.

Crucially, this is not a constitutional law class or a “preview” of what a constitutional law class in a law school might be like. Instead, we will be focused on thinking about civil rights and liberties from a political and developmental perspective. To give just one example, the meaning and scope of First Amendment’s “free speech” clause has dramatically changed over time, especially within the past 100 years. In order to understand how and why our rights and liberties have been politically constructed and expanded (or truncated) we will situate the debates about our rights and liberties within the political, social, and intellectual environments in which they occur(ed). Thus, the material covered is organized chronologically rather than thematically.

This course is intended as a survey of how law has reflected and created distinctions on the basis of gender and sexuality throughout American history. We'll look at legal categories of gender and sexuality that have governed (and, often, continue to govern) the household (including marriage, divorce, and custody), the economy (including employment, property, and credit), and the political sphere (including voting, jury service, and citizenship). Throughout the course, we will examine the relationship between legal rules and social conditions, and discuss how various groups have challenged these legal categories.

Contact the Professor directly to get permission to add the course: khoffman@northwestern.edu

Anthropology (and particularly cultural and linguistic anthropology) has long been concerned with questions of social justice and inequality to counter balance its earlier advocacy for cultural relativism. This ethnography-based course focuses on human rights discourses, documents, and actors who seek individual or collective rights and recognition through legal and paralegal means, and the social processes and changes that affect them through a broad, cross-cultural approach. Case studies concern categories of people who have been situationally and historically marginalized (refugees and migrants, prisoners, children, women, LGBT, religious minorities, etc). The course considers the concept and practice of human rights through local-level organization, legal advocacy, humanitarianism, and law at multiple scales (local, state, global), including international institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.

This course will examine multiple features of the American criminal justice system that have provoked civil rights concerns and/or controversies, such as discriminatory policing practices, racial/ethnic disparities at various stages of criminal processing, the criminalization of poverty, and living conditions within correctional facilities. We will use these topics to address broader questions central to the law and society discipline, particularly by interrogating the capacity of civil rights law to meaningfully transform punishment practices and advance equity in the criminal justice system.

In the United States the legal profession exerts tremendous economic and political power, and there are more lawyers per capita than in any other country. This seminar examines the roots of the relationship between law, lawyers, and American commerce. It will explore the law of debt, slavery, injury, and intellectual property, and examine how the law and the lawyers who applied it structured the American economy. The seminar will also explore what a law-driven economy meant for its participants, from debtors and slaves to inventors and CEOs. The seminar will give students a new, critical perspective on debates over the role of finance, corporations, and regulation in American economic life.

Law played a critical role in creating and perpetuating American slavery. This seminar examines the origins and development of the laws that built and sustained a slave society. It will explore the legal efforts that slaveowners made to protect their property and the role of judges and lawyers in treating people as property. This seminar will also examine resistance to slavery through the legal system, following abolitionists, politicians, and slaves themselves as they attempted to make a legal case for freedom. Students will learn the fundamental role that the law of slavery played in the development of the United States and gain a critical perspective on a legal system that helped sustain a vicious institution.

This course introduces students to the reciprocal relationship between law and literature: the recreation of reality through narrative and the problematic nature of language. We will analyze late 19^th through mid-20^th century European and American narratives in which law is a central theme by focusing on lawyer figures, legal reasoning, and the process of legal investigations. Students will explore the ethical value systems underlying these narratives, as well as their historical and social contexts. The class will hold a mock trial (debate) of a fictional character who conducts a trial with absolute legal power over life and death. Students will consider the US government's 2002 “torture memos” and the recent murder of the Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi in light of Kafka's “In the Penal Colony.” The course's capstone will be the guest lecture by Professor Richard H. Weisberg, the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a recipient of France's Legion of Honor. Dr. Weisberg is a successful litigator of international law, the author of Vichy Law and the Holocaust and the academic scholar most responsible for creating the field of law and literature. He will illuminate how the lawyer narrator of Albert Camus's The Fall lays bare the French legal system's complicity in the deportation and murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Also taught as HUM 370-6 and RTVF 379-0-21.

In this course, we will view non-fiction and hybrid films that revolve around crime, criminal justice, and criminal court cases. Our emphasis will be on cases that are either mired in controversy and/or emblematic of wider social concerns. Readings will accompany viewings and experts will weigh in with legal, philosophical or scientific perspectives: What is accurately depicted? What is omitted? What is misrepresented? Concurrently, we will investigate the films aesthetically: How is the film structured and why? What choices are being made by the filmmaker in terms of camera, sound and editing and how do these choices affect viewers? Throughout the course, we will consider the ethics of depicting real people and traumatic events. We will also look at specific films in regard to their legal or societal impact. Assignments will include a series of short response papers and a substantial final project, which can take the form of either (up to the student) a final 12-15 page paper or an 8-12 minute film. The final should center upon a legal topic. Ideas include, but are not limited to: A comparison of two films depicting the same criminal case, a polished/edited interview with a person somehow connected to a crime, an investigation of a local court or legal advocacy center. Group projects (two people max) will be allowed.

This course will explore the role of law in shaping contemporary housing crises related to two broad issues in the United States: the acute shortage of affordable housing, particularly for renters, and the persistence of racial and ethnic residential segregation and housing discrimination.

This course examines Native American religious freedom in U.S. history. We will examine treaty rights, federal Indian policies, court cases, and acts meant to protect American Indian religions. The course will attend to the definitions of "religion" and "religious freedom" and consider historical and contemporary case studies related to the regulation of Indigenous cultures and ceremonies.

This seminar focuses on strategic considerations for social movement activists seeking to effect meaningful policy change.  The central theme will be political power – what are its bases and how is it mediated by policymaking institutions in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government?  Given the obstacles to social movement influence in the policymaking process, how can activist strategies be modified to overcome these other, formidable sources of political power?

This course explores the multifaceted role guns play in the U.S. by surveying historical, sociological, psychological, legal, and political research. From a firm foundation of the historical and constitutional origins of the 2nd amendment, the course will focus on a range of topics around Guns in America, including: the prevalence and distribution of guns; attitudes and opinions about gun ownership, possession and use; illegal and legal gun markets; gun crime and injuries; and the varieties of responses to gun injuries and crime, including, importantly the legislative and political processes that attend their development.

This course will address a variety of issues pertaining to children's involvement in the legal system in roles such as decision-makers, witnesses, victims, and perpetrators. Among the topics we may cover are:
- the legal status, rights, and responsibilities of juveniles
- children and custody proceedings
- physical and sexual abuse of children
- children as witnesses
- juvenile culpability as perpetrators
- development of criminal behavior
- the juvenile justice system and developmental psychology
- treatment and punishment of juvenile offenders

Attorneys are central to American life and popular culture, but the profession is undergoing dramatic change. For years, the supply of lawyers has vastly outstripped the demand for legal jobs and the resulting lawyer bubble has grown. Meanwhile, those who land law jobs have different challenges: recent surveys report many attorneys' growing disenchantment with their work and dissatisfaction with their lives. This seminar will examine the profession's multidimensional crisis. What changes occur in attorneys, both individually and systemically, emerging from law schools and finding their roles in the legal realm? Why is working within the most lucrative big firms now regarded by many as the pinnacle of private practice? What other options are available? It will explore life after law school, examining the disparate places law graduates might find themselves. The course invites prospective law students to consider their potential places, as individual lawyers, in what remains a noble profession. It also invites those students in other undergraduate disciplines who may be curious about trajectories open to them in this post-graduate academic and, ultimately, career field.

The objectives in this course are: 1) to learn about international human rights conditions and refugee law mechanisms in the United States, through ongoing research related to asylum claims that will be presented at the end of the quarter in a trial; and 2) to become familiar with the diverse work of refugee-related professionals, including individuals who perform documentation-gathering, advocate for legal and public policy, and provide health care for asylum-seekers in the United States. In this class, you will be introduced to fundamental tenets of international human rights law and its domestic counterpart, U.S. asylum law. You will build upon this foundation for the remainder of the course by researching two asylum claims involving refugees from two countries, which you will present in mock hearings at the end of the course.

Legal Studies 398-1,2 is a two-quarter sequence required for all Legal Studies majors. This seminar exposes students to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to law and legal institutions; over two quarters, students will develop their own research paper on a topic of interest.

Legal Studies 398 is a two-quarter sequence (398-1 and 398-2) required for all Legal Studies majors. This seminar will expose students to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to law and legal institutions; over two quarters, students will develop their own research paper on a topic of interest. During winter quarter, students will complete their research projects and present their projects to the class. Students will meet to discuss shared readings, will workshop their paper drafts with one another, will prepare oral presentations based on their research, and will meet individually with the professor and with the Graduate Teaching Fellows.